Fedora 27 Server Classic Release

You may remember reading about our plans for Fedora 27 Server. Theworking group decided not to release that at the same time as thegeneral F27 release, and instead provided a beta of Fedora 27Modular Server. Based on feedback from that beta, they decided totake a different approach, and the Modularity subproject is goingback to the drawing board.

Fortunately, there is a contingency plan: Fedora’s releaseengineering team made a “classic” version of Fedora 27 Server —very similar to F26 Server, but with F27’s updated package set. Thequality assurance ran this version through validation testing, andit’s being released, so:

* The Modularity Working Group is going back to the drawingboard. Plans are still in progress, but it will likely produce aseparate package repository which will build on top of and coexistwith the traditional Fedora operating systems.

Modularity Past and Future--------------------------

Modularity has a very straightforward mission: to enable Fedora todeliver multiple versions of components on different lifecyclesacross multiple base OS releases. It includes some other ideasabout improving packager and user experiences in the process, butthat’s the basic thing. Every Linux user has some things they wantto move quickly, and others they want to not worry about. Fedorawants to give you that choice.

The approach in last summer’s “Boltron” and the recent betaenvisioned an entirely new distribution of Fedora software, withthe base operating system itself composed as a module. This offerssome interesting benefits — in particular, it keeps the builddependencies of a piece of software well-defined andwell-contained. But it has a huge drawback: if some random piece ofsoftware isn’t contained in a module, it wouldn’t be available onthat edition of Fedora at all. Also, the definition files formodules were another layer of complication, and it became clearthat wouldn’t get to an acceptable level of available software forreal use.

So, the Modularity Working Group and Server Working Group togetherdecided, rather than offer users and early adopters anotheriteration down that path, to release the traditional Fedora 27Server you can find above and take a different approach. The teamsare still working out what exactly that will look like, but themost promising involves adding an entirely separate packagerepository which can be layered on top of traditional Fedora,rather than building a new modular base operating system. This willmake it easy for users to opt-in when they want to, and greatlyreduces the complication for packagers.

“First” is one of the core foundations of the Fedora Project. Atthe leading edge of innovation, every step Fedora takes advancesthe state of the art, even when it’s not directly successful. And,if every try succeeds, Fedora’s not trying hard enough. Sometimesexperiments produce negative results. That’s okay — the projectlearns even when trying a path that doesn’t work out, and ititerates to something better. That process is happening now, and ifyou’re interested, please join the conversation on the develmailing list or watch for updates on the Fedora Community Blog inthe Modularity Category.